Striking the Match:
Cigarette Boycotts and a Summer of popular protest
on the eve of the Algerian War
Packaging for “En-Nasr” (“Victory”) brand cigarettes, banned by the French government in Algeria in 1948 for packaging deemed “too nationalist."
© Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer, Aix-en-Provence, France.
The history of a forgotten protest at a pivotal moment on the path to Algeria’s national liberation struggle
In June 1954, a wave of popular protest swept across cities in Western Algeria. The protest didn't manifest itself in what Algerians were doing, but what they were not: smoking. For nearly two weeks, a grassroots tobacco boycott all but halted public smoking in cities like Sidi-bel-Abbes, Oran, Mostaganem, Nedroma, and Tlemcen.
French colonial authorities and Algerian nationalist party leaders both panicked: the instigators of the boycott were unknown, and the movement seemed to come from nowhere. Then, under pressure from authorities, the boycott seemed to collapse. Eclipsed by turmoil within Algerian nationalist parties and the eruption of the Algerian Revolution just a few months later, the events were quickly forgotten.
And yet, as this book suggests, these short-lived cigarette boycotts can tell us something really interesting about popular politics and the forms of grassroots political mobilization that Algerians engaged on the eve the revolution—forms that both the Algerian National Liberation Front and its rivals would revive in the years that followed. Written for a broad audience, this succinct volume reconstructs both the boycotts and the social world that the fleeting events of June 1954 allow us to glimpse.